Startup builds intrusion prevention system for home networks

The iGuardian runs a popular open-source IPS software package called Snort on top of OpenWRT, a community-built Linux distribution for embedded systems. The device will get automatic updates for Snort community-developed rule sets -- definitions that are used to detect known attack patterns inside network traffic -- but users will also be able to subscribe to commercial Snort rule sets if they want to.

Long term, the plan is for Itus Networks to also research new threats and develop its own Snort rule sets for customers, the founders said.

The device will not only be able to block attacks from the Internet, but also malicious traffic originating inside the network. For example, if malware running on a local computer tries to contact a known bad server, the device could block that communication using IP address or URL blacklists, they said.

For now iGuardian supports a throughput of 50Mbps, which Breitwieser and Ayoub believe is suitable for most residential Internet subscribers in North America. However, the company plans to ship the device globally, so users in countries where ISPs offer higher speeds might experience traffic throttling when they deploy the device.

According to the founders, the current throughput is not a limitation of the hardware itself and they're confident that they can increase it three- or fourfold through firmware updates by optimizing the code to take full advantage of hardware acceleration.